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“... to reduce a man to jelly – had no effect on him at all. That was frightening. What was this guy on? The prosecution was led by a black DA. (One of the first lessons one learns in America is not to react to strange-sounding names: but it was striking that the black DA should be called White and the principal white defendant Koon.) King himself did not ...”

“... death – in Ravenna, on 14 September 1321, of malaria – and the tributes have been plentiful. Guy Raffa tells the remarkable story of Dante’s afterlife, by turns grotesque, lively and farcical, as the loss and recovery of his bones intertwines with the tempestuous fate of Italy. David Bowe reads Dante in dialogue with other lyricists of the ...”

“... Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin, he wouldn’t know what the hell happened.’The Reality-Based Trump: ‘Isis is honouring ...”

“... hard, desperate to hope, more endearing than Colbert or Goddard. She made up her mind that one guy, this one particular guy, would not die. She gave him blood transfusions. But when she came to redo his dressing she saw that ‘the whole back of his head was gone … and all the blood I had been giving him came ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... drank to drown the thought of what might have been. If only he had not been so friendly with Guy Burgess, whose follies gave Philby away, he might have become director-general of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Harold Philby, invulnerable to exposure and in a position to have handed the British and American services to Moscow on a plate. The ...”

“... with them and their girlfriends, who kept referring to me, in my hearing, as ‘the crazy old guy in the back room’. I must have seemed slightly mad to them as I dashed about the flat at all hours hoovering, picking up rubbish, scrubbing dishes, plunging the toilets and performing the many other Sisyphean tasks needed to keep teenage things – and my ...”

“... It’s been two years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and you buy your ticket knowing what to expect: a suave cartoon with ridiculous gadgets, clever one-liners and last-minute escapes. ‘So Long, Santa’, the penultimate poem in Ashbery’s previous collection, A Worldly Country (2007), worried that ‘it will come round again/and we won’t be ready ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... for John Minihan Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire. Paul Eluard The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my method, pre-informatique, I write this from the St Louis, rm 14 – or type it, rather, on the old machine, a portable, that I take when I migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas ...”

“... Virginia Woolf, and I believe James Joyce, though I learn from the volume before me that Sir John Reith, reigning at the BBC, forbade Nicolson to mention Ulysses, then banned. Little encounters of that kind were to be expected in those days, and Nicolson seems not to have attempted to reason with the great man on this occasion. Such high matters were ...”

“... of passers-by, welcoming travellers to Orange County. He used to straddle the entrance to the John Wayne International Airport; now, so as not to suffer the weatherbeaten fate of the original, the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County ...”

“... refinance and restructure Iraq’s mammoth foreign debt’? As if these goals, so close to the bad guy/good guy pulse of American diplomacy, were in conflict. Lobe saw the problem as a continuation of the battle between neocons and realists going back to 1992, when Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, now Cheney’s chief of ...”

“... Gunn had ‘3/4 decided to give up universities after my year at Berkeley’, as he wrote to John Lehmann, ‘and go to New York … Christ knows what I will do, but I’ll find something. I’m no longer interested in educating people – if I ever was.’ Gunn in fact taught at Berkeley until 1966, when he gave up tenure, and then returned in 1973 as a ...”

“... In​ the TV drama Bad Sisters, set in Dublin, four sisters conspire to murder their brother-in-law John Paul, an abusive monster who is married to their beloved sister, Grace. The dynamics of the marriage are clear from the pilot. It’s Christmas Day and tradition has it that the siblings meet at Forty Foot – a swimming spot just south of Dublin – for a dip ...”